In both of these cases, we see Apple breaking with their own documentation or with long-established practice with no warning, and instead using app rejections as a tool to communicate and carry out new policies. This is wretched for developers, who get caught scrambling to fix problems they didn’t know they had (or didn’t expect just yet).

January 2012

Earlier this month Apple took the unusual step of releasing a list of all the firms in its worldwide supply chain as part of its 2011 audit of human rights conditions at factories where it has partnerships.However, the company's own list made for grim reading. It revealed that a staggering 62% of the 229 facilities that it was involved with were not in compliance with Apple's 60-hour maximum working week policy. Almost a third had problem with hazardous waste.Cook insisted in his email that Apple did not turn a blind eye to conditions in its supplier network. But he did warn that the firm was likely to discover more problems. "We will continue to dig deeper, and we will undoubtedly find more issues," he said.

No major plugin is being maintained for Power Macs any more: Flash stopped updates with Flash 10.1.102.64 in November 2010, and QuickTime 7 for the PowerPC was decommissioned with the release of QuickTime 7.7 and OS X Lion in August 2011. (Tiger users have not had an update since QT 7.6.4 in September 2009.)

One of the most touted features of the iPhone 4S is the web-based voice recognition assistant Siri. It's interesting and sometimes powerful, but not always in China. First, it doesn't support Mandarin and China-based map and location services, which makes it somewhat less appealing than Apple's US-based advertising would have you believe. The good news is that Apple has said it will launch a Chinese-language version of Siri this year. Second, it can't always recognize words spoken in English. I tried it 10 times, and it recognized my words only 5 times. A Canadian native speaker who also tried found it worked seven out of 10 times. Still, it will give you results sometimes if it manages to catch only keywords.